Dechroming Google

Let's start with the numbers. In what day the company Google it will mark ten thousand days of its existence, which is slightly longer than 27 years and three months. From that first day in September 1996 until today, the value of the company has grown from zero to $2,14 trillion, or about $214 million a day, when simply divided. Of course, they were not worth more than two hundred million on the first day, the growth was exponential, so that today Google has an annual turnover of 340 billion dollars. Annual turnover grows between eight and ten percent. If it were a country, it would be by far the most successful economy in the world.

But since it is only a multinational company, Google has to obey the laws of all the markets in which it operates, and it receives the biggest threats from the domestic, American market. The authorities there announced that Google would have to give it up Internet browser Chrome (Chrome) in order to reduce its enormous market monopoly. Currently, two thirds of Internet users use this particular browser or browser. The first next is Apple's Safari with a little more than 18 percent, the third is Microsoft's Edge (Edge) with a little less than five percent, while Firefox, Samsung Internet and Opera would not pass the census in the elections in Serbia.

The mechanism is simple - most of us access the Internet through Chrome, we entered all the settings and passwords into it that allow us to surf quickly and easily. Chrome collects all the necessary data, and even more, to make browsing the Internet more comfortable. Developers adapt their applications to Chrome precisely because most people use it and so on.

About the same as with computers where most people use Windows, right? It's just that it was like that until ten years ago. Now the leading operating system is Android, primarily because of mobile phones and it is used by slightly less than half of all users. Windows is used by a quarter, iOS is stable at 18 percent, as is the case with Safari. Android, we know, is a Google product, which tells us that most of what we do on the Internet goes through the company's servers. For the American government, the fact that Google works with our data is supposedly less of a problem (they are not flowers in that regard either), but they are worried that no one can catch a breath without Google. That's why the solution is to break Google up a bit and thereby create space for competition.

This idea is not new. It dates back to the last months of the first Trump administration, and the current mention may also represent the welcome of Trump's second term. It could be expected to be one of the administration's first measures in the IT sector, even before the Tiktok ban.

The advantages of breaking up Google, according to experts, apart from encouraging competition, would be: neutral development of technology, where not everything would be subordinated to Google's ecosystem; an improved attitude towards privacy, because Google was sucking up all our data and making a profit out of it; and it is quite possible that new vistas for browser development would open up, because Google was not interested in anything that did not bring them profit.

The downside would be that those competing browsers would have to be funded somehow, and to be completely independent, they probably couldn't be free. Also, we would have to say goodbye to the comfort we now have when everything is under Google's hood and flawless, to use Google Drive and Gmail alongside Chrome. In the case of untying, it probably wouldn't be as smooth.

Which means that we are now facing a small test. If Chrome is separated from Google, it will be a clear proof that that company cannot decisively influence the elections, otherwise they would not have put themselves in this situation. Of course, there is also the other option.